About

Greetings Bitter People of the Internet Blogosphere. Bitter Ben here from First World Problemia. I have a complaining-about-first-world-problems problem and people at work started noticing so they started calling me Bitter Ben. A long time ago, I learned in marketing that you should find a need and fill it. I started noticing that a lot of people like to complain about little things, but they felt ashamed to do it, because they felt like they were being petty. So I came up with the idea to start a 900 line (1-900-BITR-BEN), where people could call and complain about all the little things that drove them crazy, but the twist was that the Customer Service Rep could also complain back. This would not only allow all the complainers to get it out of their systems, but the call would be longer and I would get more money. This lead me to come up with my tag line, “We make bitter better.” That idea failed because of a number of reasons, so instead I did the next best thing. Start a blog with the same mission. For free. For now. But someday, you will be eating in Bitter Themed Restaurants, reading Bitter themed novels, and wearing bitter oversized T-shirts. Everytime you hear someone say bitter you will think of me or this blog and you will pay a fee just for thinking about it.

So for now, jump into this safe bitter filled environment, where you are free to complain as bitterly as you like. No matter how petty, all bitterness is free to roam these wide open bitter halls, or meadows if you prefer. Comment the heck out of every post, because you can be sure I will comment right back with more bitterness. Let’s “Make Bitter Better”.

Love this, however, right now I am bitter that for whatever reason, I am not able to “Like” any post after clearing cache, cookies etc… When I click “like”, nothing happens. I couldn’t “like” your post so now, yeah…I am bitter. 😉

If you want a long answer, read each of the 1000 posts I’ve done. If you want a short answer, I write a post each year on my birthday, about 41 reasons why I’m bitter. I can give you the link if you would like.

Hi Ben! I’m writing a new blog post asking WordPress bloggers (like yourself) how you go about getting so many followers. I noticed you left a comment on my blog a little while ago on The Cool Kids of WordPress and I was going to use that:

‘I didn’t even know that people read mine to be that honest. It’s been 5 years and a lot of work, but blogging is the best, though everything else makes me bitter.’

Let me know if you’d like me to use something else. Though I think it’s pretty much perfectly bitter!

Hey Millie, thanks for asking. It was interesting because when I first started blogging, I was basically talking to myself. I wrote posts for people that I worked with and that is about it. I tried different ways to find new readers, Facebook, Reddit and StumbleUpon, but none of them really worked long term. It wasn’t until I realized that there was a Reader. I started realizing there were other bloggers on WordPress. I started following them, reading posts of theirs and commenting and liking them. Once I started doing that, they would read mine and realized that my blog was funny, worthwhile and consistent. I wrote at least three or four times a week and they knew they could come back time and time again. Then, when other people would come to the blog and see that there were a lot of followers, they saw that others liked it and found it a good place to follow.
Then, I got Freshly Pressed and found a whole host of new followers. I started developing friends from it and a community for me was born.
I still find new followers every day, and will pass 10,000 WordPress followers soon.
I love and look forward to comments on each post.

You can take whatever you want from that paragraph. Thanks for asking!

Hi Ben, thanks so much for replying so quickly! The entire comment above is great, I’d prefer to copy and paste the whole thing!! hahaha. I can’t believe you’re about to pass 10,000 followers! I can’t even imagine that. And it must have been really exciting getting Freshly Pressed 🙂 A few of the bloggers in my article have been Freshly Pressed – and like you said, must have been a bit of a boom for your blog when that happened!
You know what is really funny, when I first stated blogging I also had no idea about the WordPress reader. Didn’t even know you could use tags to search and find other blogs. When I finally figured it all out I was like, ‘Oh so this is how you find other people!’
Thanks again and I’ll you know when the link is active (though you may get a notification when I link to your site?)
Milly

Can’t wait to see the post. Thank you so much for doing it. It is nice to be recognized for all the years I’ve been doing this. And yeah, my eyes were completely opened when I first found out about reader. Crazy how long it took me to finally realize how useful it was.

You can put it right here. I love that you have a great theme to your blog and you stick to it. You have such an inventive way of saying things. It seems like all the things you say would work really good on Twitter too, so I’m glad to see that you are on there now too.

Yeah, I was into tweeting a while back, but when I realized when someone described Twitter as yelling into a empty room unless you are a celebrity or an influencer in some way, I backed off. I love scrolling the Twitter, but when their is no interaction I find myself back in the blogging atmosphere, because there is actual feedback. But I guess that people tend to gravitate toward their favorite social media, because it is the one that give you the most interaction.

I wouldn’t say that people don’t stick to their themes, but people don’t have one. I think it is easier for someone to stick with their blog when they have one. IE the bitterness. I have stuck with it because I always have something new to complain about, and I can always fit whatever is going on with bitterness. I think that people that don’t have something they are passionate about tend to fall off blogging pretty quickly.

And yeah, I might have a lot of followers, but most of them are pretty fake (businesses, bots, or bloggers that only do one post and never return to blogging). I only get about 100 plus views on days I post and only about 10-15 regular commenters.

But I would love to collaborate. I am really into the idea of doing YouTube videos, and I don’t know if you remember, but a while ago I was doing Bitter News from the Couch, which I loved to do, but weren’t getting much viewage. Let me know what ideas you have and we can go back and forth and see if something works.

I’m down with both those ideas. One idea that I came up with with another blogger was to do a fake awards show called the Awkward awards and we would be the hosts. The cool part is that it would start on my blog, (or it could be yours) and then it would go to yours. I thought it would be cool to do, but I don’t know about the logistics.

I am not a big poem guy because I’m terrible at them, but I have done a few. Let me see if I can go into the way back machine and see if I can find them. (Actually they were more like raps, but those play like poems when written.)

People don’t generally comment on my about page, they usually comment on the posts themselves. As far as the sideways picture that is how it turned out and it became something that people thought suited my bitterness, so I didn’t change it.

That monochrome represents my bland personality quite well. The banner was created by a nice blogger who is in graphic design and made it for me. I’m always glad to take other people’s hard work and make it my own.

That is my favorite way to work. I once got back at my boss for stealing my coaster, by asking her if she could order me a new one. I knew she stole it, so I knew it would trigger her to tell me she stole it for someone else. It totally worked and I was never more proud of my passive aggressive skills.

I’m in the customer service department, doing administrative tasks. I also backup on phones, and other mini departments such as export, customer service and government. Basically a jack of all trades in the dept.

Well, welcome to “bitter table for one.” It is quite comfy and pretty awesome because you don’t have to talk to people. As we all know, people are the worst and the more you avoid them, the less stress.

Hi Bitter Ben – I stopped by because I noticed you liked my ridiculous post about Feral Dinosaur Toes….now I know why :). I will have to set a reminder to wish you a happy birthday soon and ask repeatedly what kind of cake you had and wonder aloud if the fire department needed to hose out that many candles. Yeah I’m that chick.

Ben, how can being bitter being better mean suckier? That makes no sense to me. If you make bitter better, that wouldn’t make it suckier. If you make it suckier, it wouldn’t be better. Instead, it would be worse.

Since you claimed that bitter sucks, why don’t you give up on bitterness? Not that I expect you to be a total optimist. I, myself, am not downright optimistic. Hell, I can be pretty pessimistic at times.

It’s all very confusing. I call it the Bitter Circle. If I make it better, then I’m bitter. But if I’m bitter, then I feel better. It is just one eternal circle of hell, which explains the constant bitterness. Got it?

Well, I appreciate that. And I agree that a lot of people don’t agree with things I post online. I just hope that you know that I mean most of these things I write in jest and I’m not really like the things I write. Bitter Ben is just kind of a character I write. Thanks for your input.